There’s been no small amount of handwringing in the enterprise software industry about the disconnect between IT and the various lines of business that actually enable a company to do something. As a rule, we all suffer from a collective inability to define a solid set of business cases for taking older software landscapes and moving them to appropriate and desirable end-states. These end states usually start with a move to the cloud and a modern software platform, but there are other important end states as well: Build out a consolidated data landscape that can support AI and advanced analytics and planning; define a strategy for silo-busting with the goal of end-to-end process excellence; implement new industry-specific functionality and compliance capabilities; and so on.
As we continually discover and rediscover, it’s hard, really hard, to make business cases to support these goals, as obvious as it somehow feels those business cases should be. The result is a business case gap that has led to varying degrees of planning stasis. This planning stasis often feels like we’re watching a rabbit trying to hide from a hawk by standing stock still and hoping it will blend into the landscape and go unnoticed, and uneaten, once again. It’s a strategy, both hawks and rabbits know well, that works… until it doesn’t.
The “until it doesn’t” outcome is, of course, not what today’s IT and line of business leadership want to put into their strategic planning efforts, because when it doesn’t work can be at best highly problematic, and at worst catastrophic for the company that ends up getting eaten by a hawk.
As a result of having seen or heard of too many “until it doesn’t” IT planning and implementation scenarios, helping companies figure out a way to change this has become bit of an obsession for myself and my erstwhile co-conspirator, Jon Reed of diginomica. As Jon explained in a recent blog post, he and I ran a hands-on workshop at the ASUG Tech Connect conference in November that was a pretty solid first run at dealing with these problems. The workshop was intended to help build some of the bridges needed to span this business case gap, and in large part it was a singular success – aided in no small part by Basis Technologies and their Klario ValueCoach tool, and a group of subject matter experts from SAP’s Value Advisory team.
Jon’s post does a great job of hitting the high notes from the workshop, so I’ll only touch on the biggest one before I elucidate two of my own. Of particular note, Jon pointed out, was the fact that, while ValueCoach did an excellent job defining the different business stakeholders IT would need to engage with to solve a specific business problem, and the offering up some valuable pointers on how to speak the language of business when engaging with these stakeholders; the most important outcome of the workshop was the brainstorming that resulted from the interactions between the attendees, the Value Advisory SMEs, and the other facilitators at the table (Jon, myself, and two members of the Basis team.)
In additions to this and the other points in Jon’s analysis, it’s important to highlight ValueCoach’s ability to parameterize the topics of conversation for business stakeholder engagement; as well as its ability to help with the very essence of the change management problem that underlies the business/IT gap: the politics of change.
Parameterizing Business Stakeholder Engagement. One of the best parts of running the workshop with ValueCoach is how it spelled out the parameters of what an IT leader can provide in terms of information to bring to the conversation with business stakeholders and what to expect from those stakeholders in return.
In that regard, ValueCoach framed each business stakeholder conversation along four parameters:
- Context for your conversation. ValueCoach restated the business problem using language relevant to individual stakeholder personas, and in particular made a point of specifying the different ways to approach a conversation with a customer lead vs. an operations manager, or someone from risk management. In each case, ValueCoach refocused the business problem around issues relevant to the specific stakeholder personas it had identified as relevant.
- Key questions to ask. Along with presenting the overall context, ValueCoach provided a set of key questions to ask each persona, differentiating, for example, between questions for the sales lead (relating to churn and reduced spend, revenue loss from attrition, and commercial concessions); operations (centered around rescheduling or idling lines due to missing materials, overtime costs, and partial shipments); and risk management (related to risk-based claims or contract escalations, and costs related to make-goods.)
- What to listen for. With this capability ValueCoach provided additional contextual information for use when interacting with the stakeholder. Being a good listener is particularly useful in fostering empathy and a sense of teamwork – and is something unfortunately lacking in too many situations. For sales, this meant listening for comments relating to deal size, pipeline delays, and NPS, for example.
- Frame your questions around. ValueCoach also helped users frame questions to stakeholders about the specific impact of a business problem, further broadening mutual understanding between user and stakeholders. Directing questions to a sales lead like Can you walk me through a recent example where delivery issues caused churn or downsell?” provide more common ground for empathy, something that IT hasn’t always excelled at in its conversations with business stakeholders.
Dealing with the politics of change. That old saw, culture eats strategy for lunch, is grounded solidly in the politics of change. Humans by definition resist change, and beleaguered business stakeholders feel particularly victimized by IT’s propensity to change user experiences in ways that often seem to make people’s job’s harder and less productive, even if indeed the real result is quite the opposite of these perceptions.
It was particularly impressive to see ValueCoach, having stepped through the development of a business case along the lines of the five parameters listed above, rise to the occasion when asked the following question: How do I handle the politics of this?
While ValueCoach’s response broke no new ground in the playbooks for change management that have evolved over the decades, it provided a credible synopsis of the highpoints of the concepts with this response:
Aligning multiple business units is as much about incentives and credibility as it is about process.
Again, pretty basis stuff, but “stuff” that nonetheless bears repeating – indeed, while I called culture eats strategy for lunch an old saw, it actually never gets old, because these lessons seem to need to be learned and relearned with every project.
ValueCoach was also able to refine this statement with some excellent details, three of which are below:
Practical Tactics to Reduce Political Friction:
• Anchor on shared pain quantified, not technology. Use enterprise-wide numbers to make the status quo untenable.
• Make the CFO the economic owner of the problem statement; invite COO or BU presidents as operational co-sponsors.
• Sequence delivery in value “tranches” so each BU sees early wins; tie continued funding to milestone outcomes and measured impact.
While one could argue that statements like these could be found by searching the internet or talking to a reasonably well-informed consultant, the fact that this kind of information can be surfaced in the course of an interactive brainstorming session is what makes them so powerful. Using ValueCoach to workshop business case development provides an opportunity for the attendees uncover these concepts on their own within the context of building a business case specific to their particular needs, as opposed to just being presented with that someone has come up with already. In this way the workshop becomes a valuable, multi-directional learning experience, and not just a unidirectional transfer of information from “expert” to “user.”
There’s another effect of using ValueCoach that’s worth mentioning: ValueCoach, as an AI-tool, can impart a level of objectivity and impartiality to the process of business case development that can help overcome internal biases towards change. This is especially visible in a workshop context, where the overall business case is built through an iterative, interactive process that can help build a level of credibility for the end-result that’s hard to achieve by just delivering a report on the subject.
There’s a lot more to say about our workshop and its potential — this post and Jon’s touched on just a few of the highlights. It seems clear based on our results that this workshop could serve as a model for solving what has been an historically intractable problem. There’s still work to be done, but this initial foray has shown the potential. We’ll keep you posted on developments as the model evolves in 2026.
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